A lot of Franklins do second majors in a foreign language–Spanish, French, German, etc. One might think “What’s the use of that today? English is spoken everywhere in the world, and we have computer technologies that are getting better and better at translating.” On the latter point, Douglas Hofstadter, a professor at Indiana University and the author of the incredible Godel, Escher, Bach recently wrote an article about the limitations of Google Translate. He gave Google Translate some phrases he designed himself as “challenge phrases” and some he pulled from literature. His conclusion was that Google Translate did not do very well. In thinking about Google Translate’s failures, Hofstadter also reflected on what translation is. From him is is not something mechanical:
I am not, in short, moving straight from words and phrases in Language A to words and phrases in Language B. Instead, I am unconsciously conjuring up images, scenes, and ideas, dredging up experiences I myself have had (or have read about, or seen in movies, or heard from friends), and only when this nonverbal, imagistic, experiential, mental “halo” has been realized—only when the elusive bubble of meaning is floating in my brain—do I start the process of formulating words and phrases in the target language, and then revising, revising, and revising.
Hofstadter, who is by no means a Luddite or technophobe, thinks computers are still a long way from being able to do that.
I have spent a good deal of time in the last two years trying to relearn my French. And in addition to Hofstader’s points, I think of how knowing another language opens our world up to new sources of knowledge and how being able to communicate with other people in their own language is a source of great utility and joy. I am a historian who works on the history of computing and I recently read a 500 page book on the history of computing in France (written in French). It is an excellent book,making many connections to the story of computing in the United States, but basically no historian of computing in the United States has read this book because they can’t read French. As you read another language it is fascinating to see how other people express ideas, and it is a constant reminder that there are other ways to do things than the way we do things. As I traveled throughout France this summer, I had many people tell me that they appreciated the fact that I had learned the French language. Please, go ahead an major in a foreign language or study a language here. It will be useful!